


heart stopping

by Rehearsal_Dweller



Series: Learning Normal, Finding Home [15]
Category: The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: F/M, Multi, don't worry (or do maybe) - the death is one of the OCs, it's tragic but it could be worse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-28
Updated: 2014-06-28
Packaged: 2018-02-06 13:12:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1859292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rehearsal_Dweller/pseuds/Rehearsal_Dweller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At eighteen years old, Jason and Piper Grace's oldest child was killed in a car crash.<br/>(It's sort of funny, how things like that work out. All their lives, Ellis and Marina expected to die young - but not like this. Not like this.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	heart stopping

**Author's Note:**

> Oh gods, I am so sorry.  
> I put writing this short off for a long time, but I found that I couldn't write anything else in this 'verse (set either before or after)

Marina woke up that morning feeling sick. Her head was spinning, her stomach was churning, her room felt uncomfortably warm.

She drank a teeny bit of nectar and pulled her blankets over her head.

Something was very, very wrong, but she couldn’t know what yet.

 

Halfway across the country, Nico di Angelo woke in a cold sweat. 

 

It wasn’t often that the news was on in the common room. Generally, nobody had the time or energy to pay attention. That it was on, that a room full of twenty college students was watching utterly silent as they all watched with horrified attention.

There had been a terrible car crash, not six miles from campus.

One of the drivers had been hospitalized. The other, a student, not named, had been injured.

(Had been killed.)

She walked in to investigate what had everybody crowded around the TV.

“What’s going – _oh my gods_.”

Six people turned around at her exclamation, to find her with one hand over her mouth and her other arm wrapped tightly around herself.

“Mari! Mari, are you okay?” her roommate, Claire, asked.

Marina shook her head, just a little bit to each side, but frantically. “Oh gods no… no…” There were tears in her eyes, and she was turning to leave again. “I have to go.”

“What is it?” Claire persisted.

“That’s – that’s Ellis Grace’s car.”

 

Jason and Piper got a phone call at around 9AM.

_“We regret to inform you…_ ”

The world came crashing down around them. They booked a flight to Louisiana (which is to say, Jason called his assistant and told her that they’d need to fly to Louisiana, and Cam made an arrangement) and arranged for Toby and Nora to stay with the Zhangs.

They were on their way to the school within three hours of the call.

 

She threw the door open, letting it crash against the wall, not caring that the impact knocked a picture down from over Claire’s bed. She started throwing things – clothes and first aid supplies and the like – into a backpack. Once she had collected the essentials, she ran to the nearest easy source of a rainbow – the fountain in the courtyard.

“Nico di Angelo, Jackson residence,” she requested weakly.

Her father’s face appeared in the mist, already looking sad and frustrated before he even realized whom he was talking to.

“Oh, Marina,” he said.

“Daddy, tell me it’s not true,” Marina said, half-sobbing.

“Marina, sweetheart, I’m so sorry.”

 

Piper thought that they were taking the death of their oldest child remarkably well, in the grand scheme of things. It was _devastating_ , yes, but they were not entirely unprepared.

What they hadn’t anticipated, though, was to lose him in such a mundane way. A _car crash_.

When they finally reached his dorm room (after hours of talking to police and administrators and gods know who else), they found that his half of the room looked like a tornado had blown through it.

Or perhaps more accurately, a hurricane.

“What happened here?” Jason asked, a few steps behind Piper’s train of thought.

“His girlfriend came looking for something a few hours ago,” Ellis’s roommate, Gavin, told them.

“Do you know what it was Marina was looking for?” inquired Piper.

“A ring,” Gavin answered. “And a notebook. I think she left you a note.”

She had.

 

_Jason and Piper:_

_Don’t worry; I haven’t taken anything that wasn’t meant for me._

_I wish things were different. We had really been looking forward to your next visit, but obviously things haven’t happened to plan._

_All I took was a notebook he wrote for me – it has a twin in my room, meant for him. You can read it, if you’d like. He hardly needs it anymore._

_And my engagement ring._

_(He never gave it to me, but we’d talked about it. I knew he had it, but I didn’t know where, hence the mess.)_

_I’m probably not going to see you while you’re here. I need to be alone for a while._

_I ~~loved~~ love your son. _

_Please don’t let my dads flip out when they realize I’m gone._

_I’ll be okay._

_Lots of love,_

_Marina Sophie Jackson_

“How’s everybody holding up?” Annabeth asked.

“I don’t think the kids have really processed it yet.” Hazel’s eyes fell on Nora and Becca, who were quietly finishing their homework.  “Have you talked to Mari?”

“Not yet. Piper said that no one’s seen her on campus since she found out,” answered Annabeth. “According to her roommate, though, she heard about it through a newscast. She called Nico just after, so we know that that’s about nine or ten hours at least by this point.”

“Are you worried?”

“Of course I’m worried,” Annabeth answered. “My eighteen-year-old daughter dropped off the face of the earth half an hour after her best friend was reported dead. How could I be anything _but_ worried?” She sighed. “Marina will turn up. Probably within the next few hours. When she does, we’ll bring her home for a few days. It’ll be good for her.”

“And if she doesn’t turn up?”

“I’d rather not think about it.”

 

Nora, Becca, and Toby went to school on Monday.

They went to school on Tuesday.

They went to school on Wednesday.

Halfway through the day on Wednesday, there was an announcement.

“Would Rebecca Zhang, Nora Grace, and Tobias Grace please report to the Main Office?”

“Oooh, Becks, are you in trouble?” Becca’s friend whispered.

Becca shook her head. “It’s a family thing. Something’s telling me I won’t be back in the next few days.”

Reyna was waiting for them in the office.

“I’m escorting you to New Rome,” she was saying when Becca got downstairs.

“Why?” Toby asked, frowning. “We were fine at Becky’s house.”

“No, Becky’s coming too,” Reyna replied. “You’ll be staying with Dakota’s family for a few days.”

“Did something else happen?” Nora asked bluntly.

Reyna sighed. “Marina still hasn’t come back. Hazel, Frank, and I are going down to help look for her.”

 

Thalia had gotten a call from her brother, her baby brother, the night it happened.

It had been hard to sort through everything he’d been saying, because it was disjointed and heartbroken and sobby.

But the message had gotten through: Jason’s oldest child ( _how could he possibly have been eighteen, wasn’t he just born a few weeks ago?_ ) had died on his way back to campus after spending the day with a friend in another town.

What are you supposed to do when your twenty years older younger brother loses a child?

 

Piper was in charge of making funeral arrangements.

(Jason, for all that he had managed to lead armies through war, had found himself unable to even enter the room where she was making preparations for their son’s funeral.)

Everyone took a day away from their searching of what had to be the entire state of Louisiana by this point to spend what turned out to be a beautiful afternoon in New Rome.

Piper and Jason did not even pretend to keep any kind of composure. 

(Not that anyone had expected them to.)

Nora clung to her best friend’s hand with a grip that could break bones.

Toby stood with Bobby in stiff, solemn silence.

(Marina Sophie Jackson was not in attendance. No one had found her yet.)

 

_In loving memory of Ellis Matthew Grace._

 

Thursday – the _next_ Thursday, after the funeral – Annabeth Chase received an Iris Message at work. The only good news after two solid weeks of nothing but bad.

She found herself face-to-face with the immortally young Thalia Grace.

“Annabeth,” she said, skipping over normal human greetings in favour of, “we found her.”


End file.
